My mum and my aunt, both in their 80s, have a vivid memory of seeing something shocking in 1956 passing in the street in front of their house - trucks loaded with coffins, bringing back the bodies of local miners, migrants from Abruzzo, who had died in Marcinelle, Belgium.
On the morning of 8th August 1956, an underground electrical fire trapped a large number of mineworkers at the Bois du Cazier coal mine in Marcinelle. Rescue operations continued until 23rd August, but, in the end, of 274 people working at the mine that morning, 262 of them died of smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning below ground. Among them there were Belgian workers, but most of the victims were migrants - 136 were Italians (60 from the Abruzzo region and in particular 23 from Manoppello, later dubbed "Città Martire" - "Martyr Town"). The Italian workers were sent to Belgium after the 1946 "men for coal" agreement: Italy agreed to send its surplus manpower to the mines of southern Belgium, in return for 2-3 million tonnes of coal a year at preferential rates.
Over 70,000 Italian men went to work in Belgium between 1946 and 1949; in the 1950s there were 20 mining companies operating in the Charleroi basin, employing 25,000 men, half of them Italians.
Belgian mines had a bad reputation - they offered the lowest pay and worst conditions in Europe, besides migrants were also despised and mistreated. The Marcinelle disaster prompted Italy to demand better working conditions for the Italian guest workers in Belgium and, as the decades passed this tragedy turned into a symbol of forced migration caused by hunger and poverty (in memory of the miners who died in Marcinelle, since 2001 Italy proclaimed 8th of August, National Day of the Sacrifice of Italian Workers in the World).
Art helps us turning even the worst tragedy into a moment to ponder in the quietness of a museum or an exhibition space. The late French artist Christian Boltanski (1944-2021), for example, paid homage to the miners who worked and lost their lives in Belgium between the '20s and the '50s with two of his most overwhelming installations.
"Les registres du Grand Hornu" (The registers of the Grand-Hornu, 1977) consisted in a stacked pile of metal biscuit boxes like those ones children used to keep their treasures in, with a photo or the name of a missing miner and dates of engagement, as if they contained their ashes or personal memories.
"La Terril Grand-Hornu" (The Slag Help of Grand-Hornu) - a pile of black jackets from the miners of the Grand Hornu region (today a World Heritage site) in Belgium - was instead created in 2015 as an installation for the museum of contemporary arts of Grand-Hornu.
The boxes and the clothes perfectly manage to conjure up to our eyes and minds the physicality of the Marcinelle tragedy as well. These installations prove that art amplifies memory and can help us remembering, paying homage and pondering about the cruel conditions of workers in the first decades of the 20th century and in our times as well.
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